Grillade de porc

Today’s Tuesday, which means that Joe McCulloch has your Week in Comics ready for you, along with a long bonus essay on Jay Disbrow:

Needless to say, the Jay Disbrow comic most pertinent to this column is 1979’s The Flames of Gyro, a historic work not for its content but due to its positioning: it was the first all-original, full-length comic book published by the nascent Fantagraphics Press, until then notable mainly for its acquisition and recalibration of The Nostalgia Journal, a fanzine soon to undergo a title change.

Disbrow too was marginal. As with not a few artists, his career had been wiped out by the adoption of the Comics Code late in 1954; in fact, save for a small handful of romance stories with the Farrell Comic Group and an obscure two-color religious magazine in ’57 (Zondervan Publishing’s The Centurion of Ancient Rome), he had not published any sequential art since. However, as he told Zone, “[w]hen Gary Groth… offered me complete editorial freedom on the comic, I decided to go ahead with it.”

And because Joe is all about cramming all kinds of incongruous things into tiny spaces, he’s also hidden a short piece about the Walking Dead video game somewhere in there…

Elsewhere:

—First off, as all the vote-grubbers out there have already been telling you over the past few days, you only have a short time left to vote on the Eisner Awards.

—I hope you enjoyed last week’s Blood & Thunder archive featuring the J. Kochalka “Craft is the Enemy” debate. If there are any other classic letters-column debates or interviews from the Comics Journal past you’d like to see again, please let us know. Sifting through more than three decades’ worth of argument means we’re bound to miss out on some of the good stuff.

—Would you people like it if I posted book trailers when I come across them, or is that too weird?

—I don’t care what you guys want, I promise to never ever link to anything called a Google Doodle.